>> charter communications support c-span as a public service. along with these other television providers giving a front row seat to democracy. >> next on the tv, author carl looking at scientific experiments that attempted to re-create life. an hour from now, new york times reporter on emerging weapons in the cyber arms race. >> it's my pleasure to welcome the weekly columnist to the new york times and other life edge, the search for what it means to be alive. call is a respected science journalist and one numerous awards including american association for the advanced science journalism award to not fall three times, he teaches what he's a professor object in biophysics and biochemistry so carl, welcome.

>> thanks for having me. >> let me start by asking, you've written more than a dozen books about parasites, neuroscience, headaches, what made you ask the question of your new book, what is life? >> in a way, it's just there in the background the whole time i've been writing about life and from the new york times. i'm writing about these things that are alive like trees and jellyfish and the question keeps coming up, what unites them? what is it that they all are? what does it mean to be a life? it's a kind of question i delve into time to time, articles over the years and i thought maybe this is something i should go

deep into so that was life's edge. maybe i should think about this not necessarily with this answer but going on a trip with the readers starting at the core of life with things we agree are alive and going into a weird fuzzy borderland where life and non- life meet and trying to figure out where do we draw the line between the living and nonliving? >> as we take that trip to this book over and over we see scientists try and ultimately fail to come up with these theories of discovery this. we took this story you came across. >> there are many, that's the amazing thing.

there are so many stories over the course of the past say 300 years where you have scientists where in one way or another, they are confronting this basic question of what life is. ... with one living thing they would call it a living taste and

they thought it was the most fundamental features of life on earth and even gave it a latin name and even in textbooks everyone thought that it was a real thing, the source of all life as we know it and it didn't exist. there's the question of what it takes and even the greatest minds can get fooled so those are the kind of stories that fascinated me and scientists today should take comfort great minds can get fooled. >> something i wondered when i was reading about how it was an accident of chemistry was what

that tells us for with this search to be alive means is it fruitful? >> it just means it is kind of a bumpy road. one reason that this idea that it was and raised and reported on in the newspapers and everyone thought this was real. the reason in part this was at the time when scientists were able to see inside of cells and they realized there was a strange substance they called protoplasm and it started to become clear whatever it is that makes life special the answer was going to be found in that protoplasm so when scientists would look through their microscopes and think they saw

this very primitive cell like thing they might say this is it. germans in the early 1800s almost predicted this. they said the first form of life was sublime so they thought here it is it all kind of fit together until some good chemists said wait a minute we are not finding it and i think somebody made a big mistake. to the credit of the scientists that had been promoting it perhaps the greatest biologist of his time he got a letter from a scientific place where scientists were saying we don't think this is real and he

immediately published the letter and said if there's a mistake, it's my fault so he owned it and science moved forward. but there is something like protoplasm ants where the action is, all of the molecules that science to discover much later. >> i'm surprised the humility that it took to publish and at the time when nature would publish a nevermind. >> there were definitely people that would not say oops. i have some stories about people who thought they had grasped life itself and it turned out to be very wrong and they couldn't admit it and that was their doom. they would be laughed out of

science and have bitter resentment for decades until their deaths so it is a risky business to try to ask what life is. >> i'm going to do that. your book has such different criteria. metabolism, maintaining a internal balance, reproduction, evolution. do you ever come up with kind of a definition or set of criteria that satisfied you? >> no. and the more i thought about it, the less satisfied i was. that doesn't mean i don't have a particular mindset beyond what i'm writing about in the book but when you see scientists coming up with one definition after another after another, you notice each definition has an

awful lot to do with what that scientist is interested in so when biochemists were first figuring out some of the molecules of life, enzymes and so on they defined life in terms of biochemistry. someone like francis foucault discovered the structure of dna thought about life from the perspective of genetic information. so clearly it's strange because we have the sense that there's something alive starting with ourselves and part of the trouble is the philosophical problem may be we are training these questions incorrectly but

the other is a psychological one. we have intuitions about life and death and those are the products of natural selection and survival traits i would argue and those are great for getting passed on but they will not give a super precise guide to what it does mean to be alive. we feel alive in the way that sure it's obvious but we write in the book there is a psychological disorder where people are just as convinced that they are dead and they will explain to their doctors how it is they can be talking to them even though they are dead and they come up with elaborate explanations that make sense to them and so we have these

circuits in our brain that register our existence that become faulty and we are keenly aware of the lives of others and we can sense biological motion and so on. so the question should be easy to answer or there must be an answer or maybe there isn't. >> you have some wild examples of key aspects of life that show a huge variety there are in this world. i remember reading about you visited a basement snakes. what did you find out when you explored these different forms of life? >> i thought a good place to center the book would be hallmarks of life the kind of things we generally agree are the kind of things that make life life so metabolism is

something. we use certain molecules to make a fuel called atp and it's pretty universal among living things to take in nutrients and energy and create the fuel we then use to power our own bodies so i wanted to really get to know it in a very extreme impressive form and snakes are the best. pythons are fantastic because they can eat really big things, half their own weight easily and break it down and turn it into more snake. so i went down to tuscaloosa the university of alabama and hung out with a biologist who studied

snakes. we went to a place where he had basically given snakes that he has done studying to as a hobby to basically his whole basement is just full of the gigantic pythons and constrictors, beautiful animals that are very well taken care of and we just sort of fed them rats and the scientists talked to me about what's going on once that rat goes inside. the python actually has to burn an incredible amount of fuel to get fuel out of the food. you have to expend the energy to earn the energy and he basically determined that the metabolic rate of a python is totally emotionless breaking down a rat

or rabbit or something is about the same level as a horse in full gallop. a horse in full gallop. after a couple minutes but the python can keep it up for days so if you want to see sort of metabolism at its finest, you go and hang out with a python and watch them feed on things. you mentioned flying moles. they are an amazing organism a lot of people don't even know exist but if you see some jellylike stuff on the floor it is a flying mold and it's kind of like this mass of protoplasm that's extending little arms out all over the place to feed on bacteria. i went to a lab where they are basically giving them problems to solve like trying to find food hidden behind a wall or two

sources of food on different sides of the dish, one has protein and one has carbohydrates or a maze and they solve these problems and make decisions about where to go in order to get their food. they don't have a brain. it's just decision-making at its most basic level. all living things have to do that. when you are alive you cannot just be random. you have to make some decisions that help you to survive so i feel this is the pure example of that intelligence almost. >> there is that intuition obviously and there were some stranger cases of near life or possible life that you explored in the book. what were some of the strangest

ones that you uncovered? >> there are some that are kind of familiar to us like viruses, for example. they don't have a metabolism but here's something that is alive and can replicate and do things that are unique to life and you just pull that metabolism out and it's not a life or it's kind of alive. but there are other examples that also challenge us so for example there are little animals you can see them under a microscope, adorable little things and they go about their business as regular animals and they have bodies that are full of water and the proteins are in

the water doing what proteins do. they can get dried out and go into space and survive and the reason is that they are adapted going into a sort of third state like there's life and death and a sort of third state and what happens is the water disappears from their body and is replaced by other chemicals and certain proteins that form a glass so they turn themselves into glass and they are not metabolizing at all. they can't because they have no water which is essential to carry out their reactions so what are they. you can wait 30 years and then

they are back in action so there's lots of these examples as soon as possible, but a definition you can say what about this. i think that is what makes it so fascinating is that it just keeps slipping away from the definitions. >> has the virus changed the conversations at all? >> it's a great question and i wrote an essay about this in "the new york times" recently and it's adapted from a book, life sedge. i wrote a book planet of viruses. i have viruses on the mind but most people don't. you go about your day, get a

cold, don't think much about it. but they have this extraordinary existence and i think the coronavirus pushed it in everyone's face is like suddenly everybody was incredibly obsessed with exactly which proteins on the surface of the cells that it binds to to gain entry. people started to know they are rna viruses and people became aware that they can evolve and that's why we have these variances that we are stuck with, that we are struggling with. and so, then that naturally offers the opportunity to tell you now that you are seeing it

in action making countless copies of itself all around the world and bringing human civilization practically to a halt, what is this and the question this isn't new. people have been asking about this basically since they discovered viruses in the 1930s a nobel prize-winning scientist discovered he could turn viruses into crystals like salt or ice and he could just store them away and bring them back and pour water on them and they could infect cells all over again so they are a really hard case. the way to think about them as part of life if you want to be a

stickler about life we can say okay well they are in an incredibly important element of a living will. i guess computer viruses get even weirder because they require energy to exist in some form. they produce and change. >> that's a really interesting question to ask scientists especially if you have a computer scientist and microbiologist next to each other and you just sort of step stepped back and let the sparks fly. i don't go into artificial life that much. i've written magazine articles about it but there are people who study artificial life and create digital organisms and they very much think if they are

not alive, they capture a lot of what's interesting. they can evolve in interesting ways and asks scientific questions about life studying these organisms but there was a scientist named kate at the university of minnesota that i talked to while working on this book and kate is trying to build cells from scratch that are alive so she's made lots of strides toward these cells but they are a way to go and so she and her colleagues are still working on it. i said kate, artificial life, is that life and she said no, absolutely not. just absolutely no applause, no exception. really, why is that and she said i have something i call the goo

rule, as in protoplasm. if it doesn't have gout, it cannot be alive. so you know, that is the way she sees it and so that question is a live question, forgive the pun but in a really fascinating way and it's become so sophisticated and extraordinary the kind of things people can do with it. you can watch the evolution of parasites and reproduction in the digital universes but i don't think we settled the question of whether they are really alive. >> is it good enough that we know it when we see it usually?

>> life is life. the fact that a we are alive goes our lives meaning. i feel very fortunate that i have this life for these whatever decades i'm going to be here on this planet. what is that that i am experiencing. like when we do each of us become alive. there you have a very important legal question with a lot of differences. it's a hugely important political issue in the united states and massah is spending a lot of money going to places like mars with one of its missions being to see whether there is life there.

we have an amazing space program. this is incredible stuff and one of the things that it's going to do is go around and see if there are clues do we have to seek people running around to be satisfied that it's life? or to know what we are going to be dealing with not to mention looking at planets and other solar systems and telescopes. what should we be looking for and how do we know if it hit us in the face? >> i remember in your book you talked to a scientist that had

kind of this reaction to the others in your book that she tries not to let this idea not to constrain her work. why was that? what kind of definition of life does she have. she would like to send an astro biological mission to one of these frozen moons of saturn and see what's underneath there. i've said to do you have a definition of life that would guide you. i don't want to get stuck with that. it's not that important to me to come up with a definition.

i want to go there and see if there's anything interesting. is there interesting chemistry and if there is, maybe we can take a closer look and see what's going on and may be that is something that we agree on as life. what you would call chemical gardens that are you makes chemicals together in these structures. we do make them more where you buy kits and do things like that so she's doing it as a job with all sorts of crazy chemicals that mimic what's going on at the seafloor on this planet and what might be happening on other planets or moons so these might be the kind of places where some

scientists think life began on earth and maybe life could have separately begun or maybe it hasn't begun yet. maybe you find there are a lot of interesting molecules that have formed with some elaborate chemistry is going on but maybe it's not quite. maybe it's come back in a million years and it might have taken off. so it's really interesting to meet somebody that studies life on other planets that is trying to avoid getting stuck in a definition of life. >> it sounds like we know the broad strokes but there's still debate about where they actually

formed. what do we know and what are the scientists still investigating? >> the origin of life does require you to define your terms of what began and what came before it. this was something charles darwin really tried to avoid. he's like okay i've got this theory of evolution but i don't want to go there. it's too much and too complicated and we don't know enough about it. things have changed tremendously since then in that there are we know first of all there's much more about the chemical nature of life. we know more about the fossil record of life so there's fossils of microbes going back over three and a half billion

years and there's a lot of really beautiful research going on and laboratory experiments looking for a sort of plausible pathway. how could you go from the raw material of the earth to living things. that doesn't mean how life began here is the only way that it can start. i would focus on one the scientists that i've reported on for decades now. he's convinced that it began on volcanic islands a little bit of what darwin speculated on but in a more sophisticated elaborate thing. other people are convinced that it's happening at the bottom of

the ocean in these chemical gardens. it's fascinating to see these becoming more flushed out and more fascinating and they are discovering more chemistry as they go. that became the seed as the sequencing which is one of the most important ways of sequencing right now and it's possible that they will send the

sequencer to fly through one of these plumes that comes out of these cracks in the moon and you would use this to see if there's anything like dna or rna coming out of their and if there's life maybe it's got jeans and maybe the technology that came can help us find it somewhere else. you interviewed scientists you've known for decades and what is known of the wildest things you encountered or experienced while you were researching the books?

>> i really wanted to report on homeostasis getting to know bats because i think they are just amazing as life forms that can keep their internal states in balance and fly through the air and keep themselves stabilized. they can keep the temperature stable and even manage through the winter by doing something amazing, by hibernating and they shift to a new state, a new kind of homeostasis type balance. so, i went on a trip with some new york state biologists who study hibernating bats and they go where the bats are and the

bats in new york state, a lot of them go into abandoned mines. they go into these mines that were created for graphite in the 1800s so they dug away and put in timber to pop things up and then it collapsed and they left them alone and now they are just home to bats so we went to this area that not really doing very well it's just collapsing in itself and yet there were these beautiful bats that were just spending the winter there waking up every few weeks to drink water and then going back to this strange state so that was a

wonderful experience particularly wonderful by the fact i was able to get out of that place in one piece just don't touch the ceiling. that's the kind of place we were going into. but yes, it goes to show life is everywhere. every note and cranny where there's some water and inhabitable conditions you will find life. probably more likely a microbe than a bad but it's everywhere that's before the pandemic started. it's right before the lockdown.

so yes, after that, my research for the book became very over the phone, zuma interviews, walking around with when i was in connecticut and so on and also writing about the coronavirus. suddenly here was this amazing thing taking over the world and everyone's consciousness that was the perfect illustration of how hard it is. between juggling your reporting and having to cancel travel. what wound up getting left on the floor for this that you wishyou had been able to includ? a. >> there were certainly things i did leave out.

certainly not in encyclopedia of all theories and there aren't many but to give just kind of a representative sampling on this journey that i mentioned just taking this trip from life as we know it to the edges where we

are not sure what we are dealing with anymore. you did manage to get into the lab before the pandemic started for this book to see how the organisms adapt and evolve so what was that like? >> i learned i probably wouldn't be a good scientist. i don't have that exact attention to detail scientists have to have. another hallmark of life is capacity to evolve. everything that we consider so it is stitched into the nation of life and for darwin, it's something you saw the tail end

of they can study bacteria and there's a scientist at the university ron cooper along with realizing they could create a kit for high school students to run their own experience and i figured well if high school students could do it then surely i could i went over to yale.

and to move to another and we just sort of transfer them over the course of a week you are selecting for bacteria that are better every little movement was so challenging so she's always trying to create the zone of

experiments this might seem like kind of an abstract exercise but this is directly medically important because this kind of evolution happens with microbes inside our own bodies. they are forming in our bodies and for people with cystic fibrosis, a relative of the bacteria i was studying can cause terrible infections by forming these slimy biofilms in their lungs. in studying how they evolve, we can come up with studies to force them to become vulnerable to antibiotics so, you know, again like you said, well does

it matter how it works and yeah it is a matter of life and death if you've got cystic fibrosis to put philosophers and scientists in the ring how did that go? so, scientists have a way of coming up with definitions a lot. there are hundreds of definitions proposed under the years getting down to one

definition then you start saying what are we doing here, what are we trying to do, what do we mean by the words we are using. so some philosophers have talked about ideas. let's say we turn it into fine games and what we come up with a list of things that would be really hard to do because they are similar to each other and different. some are for money and some are for free. some involve winning and losing,

some are open-ended but we consider them all games and so they are connected and are called family resemblances, so maybe we should think about these things that we call living as having these resemblances to each other. it's not a big deal that viruses don't have all the things that we have that we think of as being life, but we have a lot and they are part of this network but there are other philosophers way more radical than that and they just say definitions are meaningless. it's like saying define water. according to concepts that are just wrong they don't understand that there is a molecular basis to this thing they are calling

water so trying to define it as meaningless what you need to do is lots of experiments and get lots of data and then have a theory click into place so once you have a theory of chemistry then it makes a lot more sense. with hydrogen and they do things in interesting ways. so they would argue we need a theory of life which we don't really have get. that is a work in progress. >> we are starting to get some audience questions the first one is how do you think if we found a wormlike creature would replace it without intelligence? that would be amazing. i have to say living below the

surface in a damp patch i think the bacteria are fascinating and don't get me wrong i think that it would do a lot to find a worm on mars. but you want to analyze it and that means pulling it apart and there might well be a sample return from mars because scientists are going to want to look at this up close. we do need to respect the

possibility and be very careful about the probes that we send to make them completely sterile because the last thing you want to do is feed a planets with bacteria from back on earth that are going to mask the things you want to see on another planet how the consciousness and intelligence in life all our and how difficult it is to keep them apart and understand it is very much wrapped up in our concepts of life. a reader just e-mailed me and

declared but the thing is it's organized around our brains and so some scientists have argued when we define life, we define it by the integration of chemistry and other processes whereas the most important integration happens in our brains but we are taking information and integrating them into an awareness of the world around us, the consciousness. so, that again feeds into these important issues like when do we declare people dead. this idea of integration is why

it is a widespread standard it's like do we have an integrated existence still talking about it in the book along these lines. we have another question about the double helix that can be applied and the pursuit of social equity, the connection and the innocence process, thoughts. >> it is severed from its science. people do it together, they do it in societies and what they do

has an impact on other people on the nonscientists and so when james watson and others figured out the structure dna they didn't have the innocence project in mind, this project to show that some prisoners were innocent of the crimes they were convicted of. they were after the big questions saying we are going to get to solve the mystery of life and in so doing, they created these tools that are incredibly powerful and can be used in terrible ways and potentially good ways. once you understand how how dna

is structured and given then you realize i can tell to living things apart if it doesn't match the dna of my client, that person should be able to walk free. there's a potential for unexpected good things, practical things to come out of this fundamental basic question that we are still wrestling with. we shouldn't have scientists get to peg it down trying to answer specific little questions

there's these big crazy questions and failing over and over again things like the project, out. >> we saw that with the work exploring basic life and making the discovery that became fundamental to the dna sequencing now. >> because they take care they sort of mimic one of the most primitive basic processes in life. you imagine a strand of dna or some other molecule going through and realize as it goes through, there's going to be a little change in sort of the electric charge that you could measure so decades later now, there are these little devices that can do that and they are really small and cheap and so

they are being deployed like when there's a big outbreak of ebola a few years ago in west africa people were just sequencing genetic material in clinics right then and there. so you're going to see this more and more. is being used to sequence coronavirus. that just came out of thinking about what is the minimum of life that i can imagine. >> so, you have been covering advancements for decades and this audience member wants to know what you are excited about in the next five to ten years.

>> i feel like we are going to start hitting some interesting i don't know what you call them like a phase change in terms of our understanding of a lot of different sciences including life. it's interesting to think of ourselves as being like living in a time before the theory comes together. imagine you lived a few decades before the disease helped you understand and your doctor is talking about humor and what not and it's none of it really makes sense. it's a very unsatisfying and as it comes along, things just started to fall into place. i think that may be in ten years some of these theories will be

able to come together and maybe we will look at life as a sort of property of matter like superconductivity. superconductivity is weird and when scientists first founded it, they said what is this substance doing, how is it that it's disappeared and it's arbitrary and didn't fit into what they knew about physics and great minds like einstein failed to get an answer. but eventually some people came along and offered a theory and we kind of understand what has to happen in order for this phenomena to emerge so it will be exciting to say life doesn't necessarily have to be made of

dna. life emerges when matter fulfills certain things. i am optimistic that as the scientists are measuring life and incredibly fine detail without a strong theory is going to emerge. >> i think we have time for two more questions. this one is also about life on other planets so how the ideas influence what you instinctively think of as life on other planets and how do you find that imaginative? >> that is a great question. you can't help but think about life on other planets as you see it around dusk.

i look out my window and i see trees. you imagine a planet with life on it would have giant plants. but it doesn't have to be the case. for most of the history of life on earth, there were not plants so i try to think about life on earth as widely as i can. there are microbes that live under the sea floor that are feeding on the radioactive breakdown of elements. in trying to push out my own sort of mental model of life on earth i think it's what it might

be like on another planet. we can be biased and say it is going to have to be carbon. maybe that's true. maybe it's the only one that has what it takes to produce these genetic type of molecules. so what is next? >> after a book about life, what happens next. honestly, i have no idea. at the moment, my editors have allowed me to step away from intensive daily coverage of the pandemic about vaccines and

variances and all the rest of the sciences to focus on talking about the book for a while. i'm hoping when i go back that my services writing about the pandemic will have to be put into use quite as much. i think that they are going to help us to drive down the pandemic finally. so, when the dust settles i think i will stop and ask what's next. i don't have an answer for that but i'm sure something will come. >> are their stories and researching the book that you want to dive into? >> yeah, you know, there are people basically to see if chemistry can come to life i'd

love to see that in person to be able to go and visit in their habitat and their labs and caves wherever science is happening so i'm looking forward to that after i'm vaccinated and the rest of us are vaccinated. >> have some reporting trips planned. >> well, thanks to the columnist for "the new york times" and author of life said the search for what it means to be alive. thank you for joining us for the conversation today and we encourage you to pick up a copy of the new book at your local bookstore. if you would like to watch more virtual programs or support the

commonwealth club efforts please visit commonwealth club.org and i also have to slip in that we also value the support of the readers and if you enjoyed of thisprogram, please visit the website for more information about how to support the nonprofit newsroom. i'm rachel. thank you and goodbye.

1975 cycle inflected humiliation upon the planets most powerful nation. revolutionaries provide wealth and hard work, the stairway of which the evening of the 29th of april fugitives ascended to a rooftop helicopter, secured a place among the symbolic images. as for all of my generation's war correspondents were among the foremost experiences of our careers. i was one of those that flew out of the u.s. embassy on that tumultuous, terrified today.

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